Ghismonda and Guiscardo Meet Secretly Through a Tunnel

Ghismonda and Guiscardo Meet Secretly Through a Tunnel is the carefully engineered clandestine courtship between Tancred’s widowed daughter and a young man of humble birth who serves at her father’s court. A private message, an abandoned passage and a rope turn the palace’s forgotten architecture into a route for repeated meetings. The lovers’ secrecy holds until Tancred, unnoticed in Ghismonda’s chamber, sees them together and remains concealed, transforming their protected intimacy into a danger neither has perceived.

Love Across Rank and Household Authority

Ghismonda is the only daughter of Tancred, Lord of Salerno. Her father loves her so dearly that he does not arrange another marriage for her after she returns to him a widow. Although she lives in comfort, his inaction leaves her to seek a worthy lover privately rather than ask him to provide one. The episode locates her desire within the household over which Tancred exercises authority: she has a chamber of her own, but its doors, servants and routines also make secrecy necessary.

Among the many people who visit her father’s court, Ghismonda chooses Guiscardo, a young serving-man whose origins are humble but whose character and manners, in her judgment, surpass those of the others. Seeing him often, she falls ardently in love. Guiscardo recognizes her affection and returns it; his love so occupies his thoughts that little else can hold his attention. The contrast between his social standing and the nobility Ghismonda perceives in his conduct gives their attachment its particular tension. She does not confide in anyone, and both must find a way to meet without exposing their relationship to the household.

A Message Hidden in an Ordinary Object

Ghismonda devises a discreet means of telling Guiscardo how to reach her. She writes instructions for a meeting the following day, conceals the letter inside a hollow cane, then hands the cane to him as if it were merely a household object. Her playful instruction is that he make it into a bellows for his servant-girl to blow up the fire that night. The apparent errand gives Guiscardo a reason to take the cane away without attracting attention.

Back at his lodging, he notices that the cane is split. He opens it, finds the letter, understands what Ghismonda has arranged and prepares to follow her directions. The exchange depends on both lovers reading the same signals: Ghismonda makes an ordinary object carry private instructions, while Guiscardo recognizes that the object and her manner of giving it conceal a purpose. Their first approach to the meeting is therefore already an act of shared interpretation and caution.

Making a Way Through the Palace

The route begins in an old grotto beside Tancred’s palace. A tunnel, made through the mountain to admit a little light, leads to the grotto; its opening is nearly blocked by briers and weeds. A private stair descends to it from a ground-floor room in Ghismonda’s apartment, behind a strong door so long unused that almost no one remembers it. The lovers’ path joins neglected spaces beneath the household to the closely guarded rooms above.

Ghismonda recalls the forgotten stair and labours for many days with whatever tools she can command to open its door. She enters the grotto alone, finds the tunnel and estimates the height from its mouth to the ground outside. She then sends Guiscardo instructions for reaching her by this way. He prepares a rope with knots and loops for climbing, and puts on a leather suit to protect himself from the briers. At the tunnel’s mouth, he fastens the rope to a stout tree-stump that has grown there, lowers himself into the grotto and waits. The abandoned passage is not simply a convenient opening: access requires planning, physical preparation and the secrecy of two people who know which parts of the palace have fallen out of use.

Repeated Meetings and Discovery

Guiscardo arrives at night without telling anyone where he is going. The next day Ghismonda pretends she wants to sleep, dismisses her women and shuts herself alone in her chamber. She opens the concealed door, descends and finds him waiting in the grotto. They greet each other joyfully and go up to her chamber, where they spend much of the day together. Before he returns to the grotto, they discuss how to conduct their love discreetly. That night Guiscardo climbs back by the rope and leaves through the tunnel’s mouth. Having learned the route, he comes back many times.

The arrangement is interrupted by a visit that is ordinary for Tancred but disastrous for the lovers. He sometimes enters his daughter’s chamber alone to sit and talk with her. One day after dinner, while Ghismonda is in her garden with her women, he enters her chamber without being seen. The windows are shut and the curtains drawn over the bed. Tancred sits on a cushion in a corner at its foot, draws the curtain around himself as if to hide, and falls asleep. Ghismonda later comes in, leaves her women in the garden, shuts herself in and opens the secret door for Guiscardo, unaware that her father is there.

The lovers go to bed as they usually do. Tancred wakes, hears and sees them, and is deeply grieved. At first he would cry out, but instead keeps silent, remaining hidden as he considers what he has already resolved to do. The episode ends not with the lovers’ discovery of his presence, but with Tancred’s discovery of theirs. The tunnel has enabled their meetings again and again; the concealed chamber that seemed to shelter them now also shelters the witness whose authority makes their secrecy precarious.